The Brooklyn Rail

Oscar Murillo’s curatorial endeavor, Eduardo’s birthday party on Ave. Gabriel, is a group exhibition of works on paper by Arshile Gorky, Wifredo Lam, and Roberto Matta. Each work is mounted on a wooden easel situated upon a chair, arranged to circumscribe the percipient. Deflated and semi-deflated balloons are knotted around the chairs, which metonymically denote the titular birthday party’s artist-attendants. Murillo’s curatorial ambit is to, in selecting works from Fleiss-Vallois’s permanent collection, resurrect these bastion Surrealists, all of whom had an indelible influence on Murillo himself, as well as the New York School and twentieth-century modernism tout court. The idea of curating the show as a makeshift party was inspired by a recent birthday celebration at an apartment on Avenue Gabriel in Paris, hosted by designer and collector Cathy Vedovi for Murillo’s uncle, Eduardo, during which the partygoers admired a number of modernist paintings, including works by Gorky, Lam, and Matta.

In featuring minor works by such major artists, the Fleiss-Vallois show admittedly risks sidelining general audiences. Yet the works are of serious art historical significance, particularly as concerns the influence of Surrealism, and especially Matta, on the New York School. It is well known that Matta hosted six automatist group painting sessions at his 30 West 9th Street studio during the fall and winter of 1942–43, where he exhorted Peter Busa, Gerome Kamrowski, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Motherwell to engage in an automatist group painting exercise. So transpired what Motherwell would, in a 1967 interview with Busa and Sidney Simon, characterize as “the beginnings of what later became known as Abstract Expressionism.” 1941 is also the year that Busa, who lived directly across from Gorky on 15th Street, introduced the latter to Matta. As Meyer Schapiro recalled in 1957, “Matta …showed Gorky how to flow on thinned paint and to draw with his brush.” The general influence of Matta on Gorky is well known. Less appreciated, however, are Matta’s “dechainé drawings”—as William Rubin, in “A Personal Note on Matta in America” (1985), termed them—which most impressed Gorky (and Motherwell). Compared to his works on paper, Matta’s paintings remained overly committed to concrete imagery and veristic illusionism.

Fittingly, the show includes an untitled work on paper from 1938 betraying this dechainé approach. Another highlight is Matta’s illustrated letter to André Breton, Amigo André (ca. 1944). In the former, executed one year after Matta had formally joined Breton’s Surrealist circle, inked lineal elements are contorted into chromatic folds and quickened into globular, cell-like flaxen strings and volcanic bursts, subtended by bright background flashes. In his Minotaure article, “Mathématique sensible—Architecture du temps” (1938), Matta described this approach of depicting “the rays of dust out of which pyrotechnics can create space.” Swirled streams and dead pockets spill into ruby and tangerine rivulets that bespeak Matta’s colorism. The molten gauzes of color scrawled into filmy forms exhibit a sense of free-floating space that encroaches on thorough-going flatness, going beyond the scattered perspective of Matta’s concurrent “psychological morphology” paintings.

The 1944 letter to Breton is also of great significance. It features three renderings of what would later be known as Matta’s alter ego for Breton, “Le Poète,” which, it is widely thought, Matta first executed in an eponymous circa 1944–45 painting. In the letter, an early version of the mangled, golden figure flanks Matta’s exegesis on the increasing divisions he observed amongst Americans. Here, we find Matta attending to the ethos of WWII and exacting puns on the global citizenry’s being “torn apart,” which is mirrored by the rending motion Breton-cum-Le-Poète’s gnarled hands form. Below, Matta has drawn four horned helmets recalling his remark, quoted in Rubin’s exhibition catalogue essay for the 1957 MoMA exhibition, Matta, that Breton appeared to Matta as “a sort of lion with horns on his head … fixed in a position to carry a mirror.” The other two Matta works, Les tangentes (ca. 1943) and an untitled pencil-on-paper from 1944, involve collisions of open discs, floating cube faces and esoteric imagery, indicative of Matta’s continued interest in P. D. Ouspensky’s notion of the fourth dimension from Tertium Organum. He and Gordon Onslow Ford had ardently read Ouspensky’s book together during the summer of 1938 while staying at Yves Tanguy’s ancestral home in Brittany; Ouspensky would continue to influence Matta’s multi-canvas installations and “open cube” constructions during the 1950s.

The two Gorky works will be of significant interest to those familiar with Breton’s Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares. The text, which introduced Breton’s writing to an English-speaking audience, features a number of ink drawings by Gorky that illustrate Breton’s poems. Michael Taylor, in his 2019 essay, “Arshile Gorky and Frederick Kiesler” aptly describes Gorky’s drawings as of a “sinuous female figure whose anatomy is made up of a sequence of interlocking, bonelike forms redolent of the petroglyphic fantasies of Yves Tanguy.” These drawings anticipated Gorky’s 1946 Nude, exhibited at the Surrealist exhibition Bloodflames at Alexander Iolas’s Hugo Gallery in 1947. The 1944–45 works on view are more elliptical and evince more allegiance to Joan Miró and Wassily Kandinsky than Matta, with Gorky avoiding the latter’s spatial depth. In both Gorky works, thinned plane composites fold into appended natural organisms buoyed by flat grounds. One can make out the occasional bristled eyeball, a leitmotif with which Gorky pocked his planes since Garden in Sochi (ca. 1940) and a soft, rounded pudenda. Crevices and claw-vulva hybrids allude to nature, recalling Breton’s 1945 essay, occasioned for Gorky’s first solo exhibition with Julien Levy, that Gorky is, “of all the surrealist artists, the only one who maintains a direct contact with nature—[who] sits down to paint before her.”

Lam’s work might strike viewers as the outlier. Unlike Gorky and Matta, Lam possessed an acute penchant for Afro-Cuban symbolism that distinguishes him from his Surrealist contemporaries. The earliest works on view are from 1941, the year that Lam left Europe to resettle in Cuba. The three drawings from that year were executed as part of a suite of illustrations that would be reproduced in Breton’s Fata Morgana, though these specific images did not end up being featured in the published book. Here, Lam appropriates Orisha motifs and Yoruba gods, incorporating a spindly totemic figure that prefigures the horse-headed Eleguá hybrid of Lam’s “Canaima” series from 1947. A 1953 ink drawing purposes the fowl manifestation of Olodumare, a supreme deity that, according to Santería, is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. A bird figuring in a 1967 colored ballpoint drawing closely resembles that in Lam’s earlier Etude pour la jungle (1942)—this pigeon symbolizes peace/tranquility and is associated with the Babalawo priests of Orunmila.

By adjoining Lam to the Matta-Gorky pairing, Murillo does well to avoid the spurious drama of Gorky’s suicide in 1948, for which Matta was widely blamed. With this addition, however, the exhibition’s scope, which would otherwise remain affixed to biomorphic Surrealism, shifts to a demonstration of how Surrealism’s principles were taken in varied directions. What anchors the three artists is, above all, Breton’s influence. For scholars and admirers of the legacy of Surrealism in exile, the show is imperative viewing.